"Inside the Minds of Three Student Filmmakers"

A short film about a serial bike thief slinking around the streets of Davis doesn’t seamlessly transition into meditations on how technology may hinder modern life, but no two films at the 2026 Film Festival at UC Davis could be thought of as alike, save for their resolve to serve as recognizable representations of our present-day world. 

Despite their focus on different genres and varied stylistic considerations, all the filmmakers relied on mediated understandings of selfhood and collectivity through the genre of film, working to produce, with the help of a crew, visual responses to their own questions. To some extent, the films work to address their own consumption of media as a form of art and/or entertainment, conveying what words alone fall short of, by producing their own consumable products.

Letters and Science Magazine sat down with three students to learn what sparked their interest in filmmaking, what informs their work and how their films respond to the present-day moment.

Making sense of a nonsensical world

Patrick Ware, an upcoming senior majoring in cinema and digital media, knew he was interested in film ever since starring in his older brother’s movies as a little kid. He did not, however, start taking it seriously until college. The student filmmaker presented three films at the 2026 Film Festival at UC Davis this past May. 

A scene from the film, "Hush Little Baby," starring Finn Sparlowe. (Courtesy of Isaiah Johnson)

Drawing from broader observations about contemporary life, Ware’s films — the narrative short Hush Little Baby co-written with Isaiah Johnson, the experimental animation piece The Leaning Mess and the comedy sketch Victor’s Vehicles directed by co-collaborator Caleb Silver — are primarily jumbled up reactions to family dynamics, intergenerational trauma and the absurdity that arises upon attempting to reconcile the two.

Paraphrasing a quote from director David Lynch, Ware admits that this perspective is largely what informs much of his creative work: "I think I like absurdity a lot," Ware said. "I feel like I'm the normal one and the world is really bizarre, and that’s why my films are weird." 

"Hush Little Baby looks at how our generation kind of got dealt a rough hand," Ware said. "The older generation doesn't always feel sympathetic toward that." 

While earlier drafts included an extensive storyline about Irish heritage and cultural displacement, Hush Little Baby underwent substantial revisions to ensure a tighter narrative.

The production of the film, in large part, reflects the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Ware’s friends traveled from UCLA and UC Santa Cruz to help create the project, sleeping on couches and contributing their time to bring the story to the screen. 

"It was all just my close friends working on a crew together," he said. The crew had, quite ambitiously, set out to make their way through 75 shots in three days. 

Hush Little Baby took the award for "Best Film - Fiction" at the film festival. However, it is Ware’s solo project, The Leaning Mess, that has become his favorite creative child. 

Influenced largely by the visual media he was consuming at the time, Ware — commenting on what he saw as flat, stock characters mass-produced for empty, gimmicky television — wanted to write a character who, upon getting fried by his television, begins having flashbacks of a beautiful, generic life.

"A lot of times I, too, hide behind experimental imagery, which can be hard to unravel as a viewer," Ware said. "I've been challenging myself to actually put myself in the films." 

Victor’s Vehicles, his third film in the festival, is equally absurd and beyond hilarious, remaining hard to sum up into words and resisting any categorization. You’ll have to watch it yourself.

Film as a collaborative medium

For Johnson, also a senior majoring in cinema an digital media, cinema’s appeal lies in its ability to “take elements of every art form and bring them together to create one cohesive piece.” 

"My mom is a photographer and my dad is a musician," he said of partaking in theater as a kid. "I love being able to create something that has so much art with it, and I love the control that comes with using these arts together.”

"No Admittance" by Isaiah Johnson premiered at the 2026 Film Festival at UC Davis in May. 

This interdisciplinary approach shaped the tone of Johnson's solo project No Admittance, also trickling into Hush Little Baby, co-written with Ware. The idea for the former emerged after Johnson was unable to attend his dream college due to financial constraints, after which he realized that the frustration surrounding the college admissions process was not exclusive to him. 

In their films, Ware and Johnson tackle questions of generational trauma, discussing not only how Gen Z is at a disadvantage but also how these circumstances are not primarily their fault. They both equate it to the catch-22 of being an iPad kid — children addicted to their devices to the extent that they are restricted from ever interacting with the real world, a condition they haven’t themselves created.

Hush Little Baby allowed the duo to explore the perils of consumerism, considering what it means to choose convenience over quality through the metaphor of a weird, packaged meal of slop. Their collaboration perfectly balanced their individual creative sensibilities and did wonders for both Ware’s penchant for absurdity to communicate the human condition and Johnson’s interest in the awkwardness harbored by interpersonal relations.

Visually, the productions benefited from extensive pre-production work, including storyboards, detailed shot lists and contributions from a dedicated and efficient production design team. 

Still, the process wasn’t without hurdles. 

Johnson recounted the adjustment period brought forth by the crew’s decision to shoot with anamorphic lenses — these lenses compress a wider image during filming that is later undone during editing to create ultra-wide, cinematic shots — until they eventually found their footing. And, for No Admittance, a scene originally inspired by his director of photography’s portfolio was ultimately shot by Johnson himself, due to last-minute scheduling conflicts. 

"I think the scene sort of has this frenetic energy to it because we were figuring it out as we went," he said. “I don’t consider myself much of a cinematographer. I like to experiment and it was a lot of fun improvising.”

Ultimately, Johnson is grateful to his crew for how strongly they felt about getting the vision right: “People kept inviting their friends onto the crew and it ended up being such a lovely experience. I love them all, and I just want to say thank you to them.”  

Finding stories at the heart of Davis

For Wendy Nguyen, an upcoming senior double majoring in cinema and digital media and communications, inspiration struck early, starting as soon as her freshman year, after she witnessed a bike theft outside Peter J. Shields Library at 4 a.m. 

A behind-the-scenes photograph taken during the production of "Don't Get Caught." (Courtesy of Wendy Nguyen)

Partly drawing inspiration from the CCTV shots in Ruben Östlund’s 2010 short, Incident by a Bank, Nguyen was largely influenced by the city of Davis itself. 

"We were so limited to the settings and spaces that we have," Nguyen said. "I was trying to work within my limitations, and my limitation was just Davis." 

Centering her film on a serial bike thief, Nguyen tried “aggiemaxxing.” The final result was a thriller-comedy intentionally rife in campus transport culture.

Nguyen voiced her annoyance about how student horror films can oftentimes be derivative and unnecessarily gory.

"I hate serial killer student short films," she said. "They're all kind of the same. I wanted a twist on it." 

The film contains virtually no violence and instead relies primarily on the recognizable fist, excluding knives, guns and serial killers from the narrative entirely. 

Nguyen’s attention to sound is what ultimately kept Don’t Get Caught from joining the ranks of yet another derivative serial killer student short film, with the crew’s editing of it “as if it were a music video.” She was surprised at the audience’s laughter during the screening, noting “if the sound weren't as thrilling, they wouldn't have gotten the green light to laugh without feeling like morally bad people.” 

Working under an intense two-week production schedule, Nguyen assembled a cast and crew from her club, the Davis Filmmaking Society, by manually passing out paper scripts, prompting them to take the task seriously. 

For Nguyen, filmmaking is ultimately about community and communication. Treating the craft like a language, she wants to both throw and entertain people, for which film is her most effective medium.

"I find it very hard to fully articulate myself," she said. "But with films, I hear the music. I can see and access it immediately."

2026 Film Festival at UC Davis Awards: